Bringing-Them-Home-Report-Web

Institutional conditionsThe living conditions in children’s institutions were often very harsh.And for them to say she [mother] neglected us! I was neglected when I was in thisgovernment joint down here. I didn’t end up 15 days in a hospital bed [with bronchitis]when I was with me mum and dad.Confidential evidence 163, Victoria: woman removed at 9 years in the 1950s.The physical infrastructure of missions, government institutions and children’shomes was often very poor and resources were insufficient to improve them or to keepthe children adequately clothed, fed and sheltered. WA’s Chief Protector, A O Neville,later described the conditions at the Moore River Settlement in the 1920s (Neville had nocontrol over the Settlement from 1920 until 1926, his jurisdiction being limited to theState’s north during that period).Moore River Settlement had rapidly declined under a brutal indifference. Here ‘economy’ hadtaken the form of ignoring maintenance and any improvement of buildings, reducing to aminimum the diet of ‘inmates’ and doing away with the use of cutlery – the children in thecompounds being forced to eat with their hands. The salaries of attendant and teachers had beenreduced and anything that was not essential to the rudimentary education available was removed.Even toys, such as plasticine, were removed from the classroom. Unhappiness and the desperateanxiety to locate and rejoin family members led to a sharp increase in absconders and runaways.Punishment was harsh and arbitrary and the ‘inmates’ feared the Police trackers who patrolled thesettlement and hunted down escapees (quoted by Jacobs 1990 on page 123).Doris Pilkington described the conditions as ‘more like a concentration camp than aresidential school for Aboriginal children’ (Pilkington 1996 page 72).Young men and women constantly ran away (this was in breach of the Aborigines Act). Not onlywere they separated from their families and relatives, but they were regimented and locked uplike caged animals, locked in their dormitory after supper for the night. They were given severepunishments, including solitary confinements for minor misdeeds (Choo 1989 page 46).The situation did not improve with Neville’s return. The per capita funding for theMoore River Settlement was half that of the lowest funded white institution (the OldMen’s Home). In 1936 Western Australia spent less per capita on Aboriginal affairs thanany other State. In 1938 the West Australian newspaper wrote of the ‘crowded andunsuitable schoolroom’ at the Settlement where over one hundred school age childrencarried out ‘a campaign against two greatly-handicapped teachers’. The children weretaught basic literacy, numeracy and hygiene, with a view to employment as domesticservants and rural labourers. There was no equipment for vocational training, thereforethese skills were learnt by working on the settlement (Haebich 1982 page 56). AnAboriginal witness to the Inquiry in Perth who taught in the school at Moore River duringthe 1950s gave evidence that inmates were flogged with a cat-o’-nine-tails (now held inthe WA Museum) (confidential evidence 681).Conditions in other children’s institutions are also remembered as harsh. Melbourne